Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer appealed to US Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday to help him renounce US citizenship as he announced plans to marry a leading Japanese chess official, his lawyer said.
Fischer, wanted in the US for allegedly violating international sanctions on the former Yugosla-via, was detained in Japan last month when trying to travel on a revoked US passport. He has been fighting attempts to have him deported to the US.
Fischer's attorney, Masako Suzuki, said she faxed a letter to Powell and the US Embassy in Japan demanding that a US consular officer be sent to the chess great's detention center to accept his renunciation of US citizenship.
In the letter, Suzuki accused the embassy of refusing to send an official to Fischer, requiring him to come to the embassy in person. Japanese officials, however, will not allow him to make the trip, she said.
"Although renouncing US citizenship is a legal right ..., the US Embassy in Japan has made it impossible for Mr. Fischer to exercise his right," said the letter, which was also faxed to news organizations in Japan.
A separate statement from Suzuki also said Fischer and Japan Chess Association president Miyoko Watai had signed marriage papers that was to be submitted later yesterday.
It was unclear whether Japan-ese officials would accept the marriage application. A Tokyo ward official, Yoshihisa Yabe, said a person in Fischer's situation would have to either provide a valid US passport or a US government document confirming his citizenship's validity in order to get married in Japan.
It was also not immediately clear whether marriage to a Japan-ese citizen would affect attempts to deport him to the US. Suzuki said Fischer and Watai had been living together since 2000.
Fischer became an American icon when, at the height of the Cold War, he defeated Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in a series of games in Iceland, in 1972.
He lost his title as world champion in 1978 and then largely vanished from the public eye until he reappeared to play a rematch in the former Yugoslavia against Spassky in 1992. Though Fischer won, and took home more than US$3 million in prize money, he played in violation of UN sanctions and has been wanted in the US ever since.
Fischer's renunciation of his US citizenship could possibly leave him without a country to call his own, Suzuki has said, adding that he had plans to apply for refugee status with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
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